Vivienne Plumb lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Nefarious, her third poetry collection, has just been published by HeadworX. She also writes prose and drama, and has held the Hubert Church Prose Award (Best First Book of Fiction), the Bruce Mason Playwright Award, the Sargeson Fellowship and a University of Iowa writing residency in USA, 2004.

BMP12

nzpoetsonline

BMP12

nzpoetsonline

Nefarious

When we drive up in the hired silver Hyundai there’s a single man parked by the river in a red Cortina. And Al says, maybe that’s the guy I met when I was fly fishing here the other day. And he checks his little black address book that is the size of one of those lilliputian copies of Shakespeare’s plays published by Tuttle’s Watchpocket Series. His name was Tony Bajowski, says Al. And I say, that’s not Tony Bajowski that’s some serial fucking killer in a red Cortina and he’s just put half the body in the river. And Al says, that’s only if you were living in the United States. He still believes that New Zealand is some peaceful sheep keeping cow mooing country full of friendly fly fishermen. But I stay quiet, sitting on the rocks the colour of dry bones by the Ruamahanga River, and I write my notes, swatting the midges whenever they rest on my words.

The man in the red Cortina gets out of the front and moves to the back seat. What is he doing in the back? I ask Al. He’s eating crackers, he replies. He’s hiding the evidence, I say. The Ruamahunga rushes by, going all manner of places in the fastest possible time. The sun begins to set at one end of the river and a chill comes up off the cold hard earth. Al has walked so far he has become an unidentified lone angler in the distance. A little model figurine in an old museum diorama.